Five arguments for going digital when doing business-to-business PR by Phil Szomszor, head of business and digital at PR agency Firefly..

When I think of PR social media gurus, I imagine Siobhan Sharpe from the BBC comedy Twenty Twelve delivering her web strategy for the Games. In her view, Myspace was the best channel because it has the fewest number of people using it, and therefore is the fastest growing and most exciting. She also highlighted that social media during the Games wasn’t all about the sport, but public opinion about athletes and “all aspects of them”..

It’s not surprising that the PR industry was lambasted in this way – there are a hell of a lot of people making claims about social media that just can’t be supported and I’ve heard more than the occasional “perfect curve” quote from so-called gurus.

It’s in the world of B2B PR that this anti-social media attitude is most prevalent. And while I agree that there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors with social media, that doesn’t mean to say that it should be dismissed altogether – in fact, I’d argue the future of B2B PR is digital....

[Here's a good argument for why digital PR is the future for PR ~ Jeff]

The next day at the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to see successful brands like Bolthouse Farms, Clorox, and Kimpton Hotels speak about their content marketing strategies in the same light.

Content marketing is still an evolving concept for many brands, and securing budgets, internal resources, and executive buy-in were a few of the many challenges that everyone in the room faced. But as Dusty DiMercurio from Autodeskmentioned, content marketing is “Marketing Salvation.” A way for brands to reinvent themselves and tell their narrative in an undisruptive way.

So these marketers fight on and prove out their success like a startup – by being spontaneous, hiring employees that embody the brand to tell their stories, and starting small, testing, and learning along the way....

Product brochures are the most common content type created by B2B marketers, but whitepapers deliver the highest-quality leads, according to a recent report from the CMO Council and the NetLine Corporation.

The report was based on data from a survey of 213 senior B2B marketing leaders (primarily located in North America), with 46% working at brands earning more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

Some 84% of respondents say their company creates product brochures; the next most-commonly created content type is slide presentations (79%), followed by whitepapers (78%), and videos (76%).

However, when respondents were asked to select which content types produce great leads, whitepapers come out on top (cited by 24%), followed by videos (22%), analyst reports (22%), and webcasts (22%)....

A lightbulb moment can set you on a new course or change the direction of your path. Whether a seemingly obvious observation or an innovative insight, it reveals something that you never realized in a particular context.In the rapidly evolving world of content marketing, these aha moments can come from almost anyplace.

We asked the presenters for Content Marketing World 2015 to share their favorite content marketing revelations from the past year. While their answers cover everything from the simple to the complex, each has the potential to turn on a switch in your mind or make you nod in agreement.

Which ones will be an epiphany to advance your content marketing programs?...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

The presenters for Content Marketing World 2015 share their aha content marketing revelations from the past year.

“You can’t put a sausage into a meat grinder, crank the handle backward, and get a pig,” a friend once told me. The gruesome reference has always helped me with the concept that once mixed, some things remain that way forever.

The same can be said for business andstorytelling. While it’s trendy to portray them as new BFFs, the duo has always held a tight relationship. It’s revealed daily as buyers and sellers perform the transaction tango.

Business, like the sensual dance, is driven by four-letter words. One feeds off of our carnal instincts. The other attempts to justify the pursuit of these pleasures. And before your mind has a chance to caminatathrough the gutter, the four-letter words that I’m referring to are want and risk. Professional communicators that understand these core motivators excel at winning hearts and minds through stories....

Social media can be used in so many ways – to develop your brand, increase SEO rankings, distribute content, acquire leads, and more. While many blogs talk about these benefits, there are very few that attempt to outline the “big picture” of social media or a comprehensive list of its benefits.

I decided to take a stab at it and ended up with 75 benefits of social media marketing. Below is an infographic with a compiled list of benefits. Check it out and see which benefits your brand is potentially missing on social media....

SEO and content marketing are still not one and the same. However, they’re much more similar to each other today than what they were last decade. For much of this decade the search algorithms allowed for a “build it and they will come” environment for content marketers. In some ways, social media networks did, too. Both HubSpot and Moz reaped the benefits of this over the years. This made content marketers feel like SEOs and SEOs that created content for real consumers feel like content marketers.

Over the last five years the cat’s been let out of the bag. It’s no longer a secret that content marketing can drive copious amounts of traffic to a brand’s website. That’s one of the major reasons why the amount of content on the Internet is supposed to grow by 500% in the year 2020.

A lot of that growth in content can likely be attributed to the thought leadership of brands like Moz, HubSpot and CMI. However, in an era of 500% more content it becomes much more difficult for content to stand out, regardless of the channel (search, social, email, etc.).

Add to that, social media networks and search engines aren’t built to serve up that much content today. With social algorithms purposefully reducing organic visibility and only 10 organic positions on the first page of most search engines, how are brands supposed to stand out?

The age of “build it and they will come” is over for many major industry verticals. This conundrum has further pushed the two circles in the Venn diagram above further together....

So how can you keep making the most of social media without interrupting your workflow?

At Creative Boom, automation is our secret. Not automation that makes it obvious that we’re automating everything… which can sometimes seem worse than not saying anything at all. No. The kind of clever automation that makes it look like we’re naturally updating our social media channels, when in actual fact we’re elsewhere, attending a client meeting and not even looking at our smartphones.

I’ve put together the following helpful tips — based on our own experiences — that will show you how to automate your social media without giving the game away, so you can save time and get on with being creative…...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Katy Cowan shares how you can automate all of your social media marketing, leaving you more time to be creative and work on your own business. Recommended reading! 9/10

Google's algorithms are better-focused than ever, according to a new study from Searchmetrics.

In its fourth annual Google ranking factors study, the enterprise platform looked at the top 30 search results for 10,000 keywords and 300,000 websites on Google. According to Marcus Tober, founder and chief technology officer at Searchmetrics, the findings simply confirm the current trends.

"Understanding user intention and creating unique, relevant content is more vital than ever before," Tober says. "It is also visible that backlinks are continuing to decrease in relevance. Looking ahead, as the proportion of search queries from mobile devices continues to grow, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the rankings.

"Some factors Searchmetrics saw positively affecting the rankings include mobile-friendliness; social signals, such as Facebook likes and Tweets; and backlinks, though the latter will likely decrease in importance. The study focuses on three other main areas...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Analyzing 300,000 websites and 10,000 keywords for its annual Google ranking factors study, Searchmetrics found that technical factors, such as keyword domains, are the most important.

Original research means you’re doing all the work yourself, which makes it both a strength and a weakness of the strategy. It’s a strength because no other companies or individuals have sought to engage in this research before, but it’s a weakness because it takes significant time (or money, or both) to conduct this research. Some research ventures take months of careful planning and execution and hours of compiling to generate meaningful statistics.

Fortunately, you don’t have to commit to that level in order to create a solid, well-researched whitepaper. There are alternatives you can use to conduct the research necessary for a reasonable whitepaper without spending all your marketing budget or wasting countless hours of time...

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Whitepapers are some of the most valuable types of content you can produce.

In what likely is the first comprehensive analysis of actual data from big agency media buys of its kind, Madison Avenue’s major agency holding companies have boosted their spending in digital media by $3 billion during a nine-month period ending with June 2015, and most of it came at the expense of traditional media.

The data, which was released Wednesday by Standard Media Index, looked at the those months, because they happen to coincide with the so-called “broadcast year,” which is the way TV networks and stations typically account for their advertising revenues. Not surprisingly, the biggest hit in Madison Avenue’s digital media shift is coming from their TV advertising budgets.“

The results show that digital is siphoning share away from other media, with the bulk of it coming from television,” explained SMI’s Bree Sutton, noting that national TV ad spending trends have been reflecting that....

Compelling and relevant content will help you attract more customers to your website and keep them engaged with your brand. Your followers are more likely to respond to tweets that are relevant to them.

This brings us to the need for Twitter marketing, and how from generating ideas to promoting on Twitter for free or paid, there are numerous things you can do on Twitter alone to ensure that it fits well into your content strategy.

This guide will highlight Twitter as one of your vital tools in your content marketing strategy and ensure that more people engage with your content....

By far, the most popular post we have ever published at the Content Marketing Institute is 10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers. Though this post is almost two years old, our readers still seem to clamor for this type of information and advice.

To that end, we wanted to provide a refresher on the most popular templates and checklists shared by the CMI team and our guest contributors. Some of these are “oldies but goodies” that we included in the first list, and others are new. All are intended to simplify some part of the content marketing process — and all can be customized to your particular needs....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

The most popular post CMI ever published is "10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers." Discover what's new and old favorites on an updated marketing list.

We put together a periodic table of e-commerce to spotlight the top e-commerce startups, industry categories, exits, and investors

.The table is meant to serve as a guide to navigate the key players in the space. The 131 companies and investors in the table were chosen using CB Insights data and analytics around momentum, financial health, and investor quality....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

These are 131 players in the e-commerce space that are worth watching. Recommended reading. 9/10

Did you know that, an estimated 74 percent of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video? And that viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10 percent when reading it in a text article.

What if I told you videos are shared 1200 percent more times than links and text combined. And that websites with videos have up to 800 percent more conversion than the same website without a video.

It's no secret that video content is on the rise, and to stand out you need to do something that very few others are doing.

This infographic (featured below) from Salesforce, illustrates important marketing tips that you need to know to integrate video into your social media strategy....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Do you have videos in your content library. Are you considering adding video to your content marketing strategy? If not, you should. Why? Useful tips.

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if I could get them a No. 1 Google ranking for a specific non-branded, hyper-competitive keyword, I would be rich. If I had a dollar for the number of times the people asking me that question actually had the content to warrant such a listing, I would be poor.

Many digital marketing folks, especially in enterprise B2B companies, don't quite understand the relationship between content and SEO. It's long been said in SEO circles that content is king. However, some SEO folks would argue that links or social engagement is king, and that content is the primary driver of links and social success. There are valid arguments on all sides of that meaningless debate, but the point that often gets lost is that creating the best user experience for the vast majority of people searching for a specific keyword is probably what's going to get you ranked consistently for that keyword.

A content strategy that supports that bigger vision is typically different than the customer-focused strategies most B2B companies use. Many people over the years have told me, "Our company is the market leader for this term! We should be No. 1!" That is often true for products or services that are relevant to the keyword phrase they are targeting. It is true that brand recognition - and certainly the links that typically accompany successful brands - make it more likely that a company will rank well for relevant terms, but the fact remains that brand authority is not always enough to guarantee a top ranking for a particular keyword....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

Without a content strategy that appeals to everyone who searches for a specific keyword, rather than just your target audience, you may not achieve the SEO results you're hoping for writes Catfish Comstock.

Without a content strategy that appeals to everyone who searches for a specific keyword, rather than just your target audience, you may not achieve the SEO results you're hoping for writes Catfish Comstock.

Without a content strategy that appeals to everyone who searches for a specific keyword, rather than just your target audience, you may not achieve the SEO results you're hoping for writes Catfish Comstock.

Without a content strategy that appeals to everyone who searches for a specific keyword, rather than just your target audience, you may not achieve the SEO results you're hoping for writes Catfish Comstock.

The growing numbers apart, what smartphone-makers as well as startups, app developers, and marketers really want to know is what these 150 million people are doing on their smartphones. Now, mobile marketing platform Vserv has released a report based on a Nielsen study on the profiles and behaviors of different segments of Indian smartphone users.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

- The Indian smartphone user base has been growing at 26 percent CAGR from 2013.

- Nearly two-thirds of the smartphone users in India are less than 25 years old.

- Users spend on average 169 minutes per day on their smartphones.

- Nearly a quarter of the smartphone users downloaded 18.5 mobile apps and games on average every month.

- Nearly 20 percent of the smartphone users spend over two hours a day using chat and social networking apps

- 15 percent of the smartphone users spend almost an hour each day playing games, listening to music, or watching videos....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

A Vserv-Nielsen study details the profiles and behaviors of different segments of smartphone users in India.

But there is a myriad of other trending topics that have nothing to do with celebrity slip-ups and break-ups – subjects that are actually relevant to your audience, in your field. The tricky part for most writers is finding a relevant subject that’s trending.

However, writing within the context of the trends can score a pretty high payoff for reader engagement, so it is worth making the effort. If you consistently touch on highly sought after or hotly debated subjects, the result will be a steady increase in traffic over time, and perhaps some drool-worthy peaks of sudden interest along the way

.Aside from the obvious benefit of increased traffic and increased reader engagement, writing on trending topics adds to a writer’s credibility. If you are writing on trending topics, obviously you are in the know....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

The world is talking. Is your content talking about the same things? Here are four ways to make sure it is. In the world of online content, the topics people write about are often quite random.

But then, this begs the question: if Matt and Google have stuck a fork in one of the most used and effective method of link building — guest blogging, what other link building tactic could replace it? Infographics.

Heck, they even generate more backlinks than most other link building tactics on the Web.“…these visual content pieces are generating more backlinks than any other form of content I publish, which—in the long run—helps increase my search engine rankings and overall readership numbers.” says Neil Patel — Renowned Internet marketer.

Top content marketing influencer, Jeff Bullas, also mirrors Neil’s idea in his post on 9 awesome reasons to use infographics in content marketing...

The opportunity that platforms like LinkedIn and Medium offer is they have an already existing audience and they allow you to amass a following that will increase your content’s likelihood of discovery. Millions of people visit the home pages of LinkedIn and Medium each day, and their publishing tools provide you the opportunity to place your content in front of those readers and generate real engagement when they click into your article....

Jeff Domansky's insight:

The small, medium and large of posting on your own blog, on Medium and on LinkedIn? Traffic!